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What’s the big idea: What if Toronto, the most multicultural city in Canada, was to highlight this fact with a virtual Gallery of Human Migration (GoHM)? This initiative will recognize all citizens as having contributed to the well-being of Toronto. Furthermore, it will be of significance to the intangible heritage within the UN’s cultural policies: making the impermanent permanent with its fundamental dimensions of improvisation and adaptation. The vast majority of Torontonians and Canadians (from a poll done by Pollara a few years ago) support this initiative.

The GoHM will focus on the concept that the movement of peoples to, from and within Canada is a basis for the formation of its citizens, values and culture. Canada is in a position to showcase the means and mechanisms that symbolize its achievement in the national and international stage. The convergence and interplay of various civilizations in Canada and in particular Toronto will provide insight and spark debate that will contribute to the public policy decision-making process and strengthen the quality of the public policy decisions made by governments, citizens and institutions.

How will the big idea work: The Gallery of Human Migration will become a unique cultural resource giving Toronto an international identity. Culture, as Jon Hawkes advocated, constitutes the fourth pillar to sustainable development in addition to the economic, social and environmental ones.

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The GoHM proposes to recognize the transformational power of migration, its respective “coloratura” and the oftentimes painful challenges that accompany it as being intrinsic to the development of societies. There is at present a new realization that one of the most important intangible cultural resources Canada has that the world needs is an understanding of how a pluralistic society, evolving from a multicultural process, is created and nurtured.

Migration is a human story — a journey of convergence and transformation. It’s a personal story, a community’s story, a nation’s story. It ebbs and flows, has milestones and occurs in different phases. To represent this journey the Gallery has defined four central themes which represent the phases of an individual’s journey and it’s similarly how fits within Canadian society: beckoning, beginning, becoming, belonging.

The process from Beckoning to Belonging is often perceived as being commonplace, too often undeserving of notice. Toronto has made this commonality a thing of greatness. It is the strength of this commonality and its openness to all members of society that sparked the notion of a final theme, “binding”. If binding is the celebration of the common thread uniting individuals, individuals with communities and communities to each other and to Canada, it seems only fitting that binding should not be constrained to a physical space, but rather be as open and ubiquitous as the commonness Canada so successfully celebrates.

The binding, therefore, is a virtual space – a virtual Gallery of Human Migration that will enable any person, organization, institution or government agency to participate, contribute, collaborate, communicate and celebrate the rich tapestry of the common experience, while clarifying and recognizing the very unique and specific ways Canada, and in particular Toronto, has embraced migration.

How much will your big idea cost, and how would it be funded: The cost to create the virtual Gallery (based on the use of Open Source licenses where possible) is in the $175,000 to $240,000 range. It will be funded by sponsors, users and endowments from various communities.

The Gallery, through mobiles, will attract and engage millennials and young consumers, offering them not only the chance to connect, but interact, contribute and collaborate as well as to learn about the Gallery, Canada and Canadian society.

There are more mobile phones on the planet than humans and mobile represents an opportunity for the Gallery to make fundraising and donations easy for consumers, and corporations.

How will you implement your big idea: In the “pioneering” spirit of those who migrate, the GoHM will be implemented through the web. It is a vibrant social experience that uniquely combines mainstream Internet, content management and e-learning systems with newer cloud, mobile, gamification, augmented reality, social networking, and chat functions, to accommodate the needs of all potential stakeholders: consumers, institutions, organizations and agencies.

Intended to be both device agnostic and platform independent, responsive design also means the Gallery can be multilingual and especially user friendly, with icons representing features or functions wherever possible. Removing language as a barrier, we believe we can facilitate bi-direction communication, engagement and better collaboration between people, organizations and communities, while encouraging all parties to participate and share learning regardless of the mother tongue.

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